Fighting terrorism: It's an ideological war

Noor Huda Ismail, Jakarta

It was not surprising when convicted terrorist Imam Samudra, sentenced to death for his role in the Bali bombing in 2002, in his autobiography titled Me against the Terrorist contains harsh justifications for the Bali attacks that could inspire other militants.

This year, Nasir Abbas, a reformed Jamaah Islamiyah member told me that one of the bombers in front of the Australian Embassy in September 2004 was inspired by Samudra's book to join 'the jihad'. In August 2005, while in police detention in Ambon, Asep Djaja (31), one of the alleged terrorist members who were involved in the police attack on Seram Island expressed the same thing to me.

The book has been receiving a very good response among militants. In my interview with Achmand Michdan, Samudra's attorney who wrote the foreword, he said that thousands of copies had been distributed in at least seven cities across islands of Java and Sumatra. Michdan said that the publisher was considering translations of the book into English, French and Arabic.

Last month, Indonesia's top clerics and Muslim intellectuals formed a special task force, dubbed the "antiterror team". It has been reported that Samudra's book is on the top of the list of books for them to study.

The team will face some difficult tasks amid the fact that the Indonesian public is skeptical about the existence of such a terrorist problem. Worse still, I interviewed some members of this new team a couple of years ago and their collective view was that the whole war against terrorism was part of a plan to weaken Islam. Some even asked: "Who is the 'real' terrorist?"

Of course Samudra is, to one group of people, a "terrorist", but he may well be a "freedom fighter" to another group.

Other examples of such definitions that depend upon which side one is on were the Nazi occupiers of France. They denounced the "subnational" and "clandestine" French Resistance fighters as terrorists. During the 1980s, the International Court of Justice used the U.S. Administration's own definition of terrorism to call for an end to U.S. support for "terrorism" on the part of Nicaraguan Contras opposing peace talks.

One may say that Samudra's ideas in his book are just "nonsense" and "groundless". But, in fact, his ideas can be traced back to the Egyptian radical Muhammad al-Faraj, who was executed by Cairo in 1982 for his role in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat.

Faraj's pamphlet, The Neglected Obligation, was influenced by the works of al Banna, Maududi and Qutb that brought their insidious, absolutizing ideas to their ultimate conclusion. Faraj asserted that the "Koran and Hadits were fundamentally about warfare". He also said that not just infidels, but even Muslims who deviated from the moral and social dictates of sharia were legitimate targets for jihad.

While Samudra's global awareness becomes evident by his statement: "Remember, the main duty of Muslims is Jihad in the name of God, to raise up arms against the infidels, especially now the United States and its allies", was inspired by the teaching of charismatic Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, a key mentor of Osama bin Laden. Azam met the family of Qutb and was friendly with the "blind sheikh" Omar Abdur Rahman, who would later be implicated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York.

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, Azam, who recruited non-Afghan Mujahidin, including Southeast Asians like Samudra, began to set his sights on bigger things. He argued that the struggle to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan was in fact "the prelude to the liberation of Palestine" and other "lost" territories.

To prevent the spread of Samudra's ideas there must be a campaign to delegitimize them -- not to just arrest or kill him. Samudra's ideas occupy an enormous influential and important symbolic position, which is often inextricably connected to the organization's very existence. Therefore, the public diplomacy campaign to discredit his ideas is even more important than his actual arrest or death.

Islam is a peaceful religion, and the mere possibility of multiple interpretations of holy war as a way of defending an Islamic community that is under attack and the strong religious- political desire to found a caliphate on strict sharia principles is, in my opinion, the main reason for today's exclusionary radicalism and terrorism coming from Islamic circles.

"As long as within Islam itself a fundamental process of rethinking of and public debate on ancient values (and especially the concept of jihad) in a modern, highly technological and globalized cultural environment, its exclusive religious and political aspirations and above all its too literal interpretation of the surah (chapter) of the Koran, Islam itself will remain a breeding ground for violent and undemocratic movements," explains Frans G. de Kuijer, a western social researcher who lives in Yogyakarta and is married to a Javanese Muslim.

Mind: in a democracy like today in Indonesia, political Islam has the best chance to reach the above-mentioned goals within the existing political-legal structure. A lot of "injustice" towards non-Muslims today can be explained by the fear of the democratically chosen governments to openly criticize or to strongly oppose the "unlawful" behavior of hard-liners.

Thus, to halt the bombings we also need research to understand the dynamics of the ideas of the group together with its arrangement of psychological and cultural relationships that are attracting and forging dozens, possibly hundreds, of mostly ordinary people into a terrorist organization.

This call for research demands more patience and there is no magic bullet to solve this problem. The awareness should be built because the cost of ignorance is too severe to consider.

The writer earned a British Chevening scholarship and is now undertaking a postgraduate program on International Security Studies at St. Andrews University. He can be reached at noorhudaismail@yahoo.com.